Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch I Am Legend
2007 · Francis Lawrence · I Am Legend on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how small Neville is inside the widescreen frame. (camera)
Andrew Lesnie shoots anamorphic and gives most of that width to the city. Fifth Avenue's geometry runs off both edges. Neville is one figure inside a landscape that no longer needs him.
Payoff: The city stops being somewhere he acts and becomes something he can only take in and move through. In the reading: espace quelconque (any-space-whatever). Midtown drained of its human center is what the reading calls an any-space-whatever: a place that has stopped organizing action.
Watch the sun rather than the road during his drives. (light)
Lesnie keeps the daylight cool and clean, then lets night go dark and grainy. The change between the two registers is the film's clock, and late afternoon becomes a deadline you can see.
Payoff: The dread is built out of time rather than out of a creature, so you feel it before anything appears.
Listen to what a city sounds like with no traffic. (sound)
No engines, no voices, no machinery. The ambient track is grass, wind and Neville's own footsteps. James Newton Howard's score stays out of the way instead of filling the hole.
Payoff: The silence carries the loss, so the emptiness reaches you through your ears as much as your eyes.
Listen for Neville talking out loud to an empty city. (sound)
He greets the street, narrates to his dog, and sends the same radio broadcast every day. The talking is a habit aimed at a room that never answers.
Payoff: He keeps the act of speaking to someone alive by inventing the someone, because there is nobody left to address. In the reading: fabulation / legending. Talking a population into existence out of an empty city is what the reading calls fabulation, done because the people are missing.
Watch Smith run the same routine at the same hours. (performance)
The hunting, the lab work, the taped morning news, the patrol before dark. Smith plays all of it as inhabited habit rather than exposition.
Payoff: The discipline is the character. He holds a soldier's shape over a life that has little room left for it.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the light, not the man. The film keeps one eye on how much daylight is left.